Thursday, 6 April 2017

Thinking a Bow-and-Arrow (2012)

Here is a paper by Marlize Lombard & Miriam Noël Haidle that develops and applies a visualisation technique to describe the complex series of actions required for tasks such as making a fire, using a composite, stone-tipped spear and making and using a bow and arrow - three vital technologies for human history.

Above an example of the visualisation as applied to using a stone-tipped spear.

The Abstract reads:

For various reasons increased effort has recently been made to detect
the early use of mechanically-projected weaponry in the archaeological
record, but little effort has yet been made to investigate explicitly
what these tool sets could indicate about human cognitive evolution.
Based on recent evidence for the use of bow-and-arrow technology during
the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa by 64 kya, we use the method of
generating and analysing cognigrams and effective chains to explore
thought-and-action sequences associated with this technology. We show
that, when isolated, neither the production of a simple bow, nor that of
a stone-tipped arrow, can be reasonably interpreted to indicate tool
behaviour that is cognitively more complex than the composite artefacts
produced by Neanderthals or archaic modern Homo.
On the other hand, as soon as a bow-and-arrow set is used as an
effective group of tools, a novel cognitive development is expressed in
technological symbiosis, i.e. the ability to conceptualize a set of
separate, yet inter-dependent tools. Such complementary tool sets are
able to unleash new properties of a tool, inconceivable without the
active, simultaneous manipulation of another tool. Consequently,
flexibility regarding decision-making and taking action is amplified.
The archaeological evidence for such amplified conceptual and
technological modularization implies a range of cognitive and
behavioural complexity and flexibility that is basic to human behaviour
today.